Chase was named one of the most influential people in Digital Health due to his entrepreneurial success & writing along with luminaries such as Eric Topol, Patrick Soon-Shiong, Vinod Khosla & Elizabeth Holmes. He speaks to & consults with new ventures inside of established companies & high growth startups. Chase is widely published. The book Chase co-authored won the healthcare Book of the Year in in 2014.
Chase has a penchant for making connections between previously disconnected trends and making them understandable and actionable. Chase is in the development stage of a documentary that seeks to make the indecipherable understandable and demonstrate that there is reason for great optimism that a partnership between doc-entrepreneurs and forward-looking clinicians with individuals (fka “patients”) can dramatically out-perform against Quadruple Aim* objectives compared to traditional healthcare orgs.
*The Quadruple Aim is the Triple Aim (improved outcomes & patient experience with lower costs) plus the overlooked 4th Aim — clinician satisfaction critical to improving the current condition where an alarming number of clinicians are overburdened & burnt-out which negatively impacts their lives as well as the individuals they care for.
Chase was the CEO & Co-founder of Avado, which was acquired by and integrated into WebMD and the most widely used healthcare professional site - Medscape.
Before Avado, Chase spent several years outside of healthcare in startups as founder or consulting roles with LiveRez.com, MarketLeader, & WhatCounts. He also played founding & leadership roles in launching two new $1B+ businesses within Microsoft.
Chase is a father, husband & oxygen-fueled mt sport athlete. His 2014 team placed 3rd in their division & 24th overall (out of 500 teams) in America's oldest adventure race (7 legs -- XC ski, downhill ski, run, road bike, canoe, mt. bike & sea kayak) where Dave took on the Nordic ski leg. Dave was a former PAC-10 800 Meter competitor.

What Is Healthcare's Most Important Medical Instrument? Not What You Think

It’s clear the days of the “do more, bill more” model of reimbursement are numbered. While there are many unknowns regarding the future model, one thing is couldn’t be more — highly effective communication will separate the winners from the losers.

The improvement in the depth and breadth of communication seen in the consumer Internet and in the consumerization of the enterprise (iPhones, Yammer, etc.) is just beginning to fully impact healthcare. With healthcare representing nearly 20% of the economy, it is inevitable that communications will be a key driver as the tectonic shifts in healthcare shake out. Ushered in will be an array of new technology players similar to consumer and enterprise arenas disrupting ineffective and expensive communication methods of the past.

[Disclosure: Dr. Swanson is an advisor to my company, Avado. Some of the individuals and organizations highlighted below have worked with my patient relationship management company, Avado, which is why I'm familiar with their approach to communication.]

The importance of this can’t be overemphasized given that roughly three-quarters of healthcare spend is driven by chronic conditions. Decisions made while a condition is in low acuity can rapidly lead to high acuity flare ups that drive large medical bills. As Dr. Swanson states, “the steering wheel should be attended by the patient.” After all, even someone with a chronic condition spends 99+% of their life away from healthcare providers and no one else besides them is in the driver’s seat.

Adapted from Nuka System of Care

There has been great focus put on improving communication between healthcare professionals through standards and incentives related to the new models being driven by private and federal insurance programs. The Patient Centered Medical Home and the Accountable Care Organizations are the two most high profile of these. However, the communication focus has been about the patient not with the patient. Having implemented or review hundreds of healthIT systems, the fact is the fundamental purpose of the “patient” as envisioned by these systems is that the “patient” is merely a vessel to attach billing codes to — not a core part of the care team. This old approach will prove to be a fatal flaw in the new reimbursement models. Throwing bodies (e.g., care coordinators) at the problem can help, but will be at a disadvantage versus approaches that combine the best of human and technology driven communication methods.

There are efforts being made to tweak legacy software to address these requirements. Unfortunately, they are as likely to meet the new imperatives as YahooYahoo, AOLAOL, and MicrosoftMicrosoft have been at becoming market leaders in social networking. The reality is FacebookFacebook built social networking into their core design from the ground up and bolting a dramatically different approach onto an old system rarely works whether it is social networking or patient-provider communications.

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The biggest “disruption” in healthcare is honest, direct, accessible communication. My patients aren’t hungering for more information. They want someone to look them directly in the eye, and help them makes sense out of the glut of information they are already exposed to. They want to know what all the evidence means to them personally. They want a face, a voice, but one that is invested in their success and understanding. The better the technology gets, the easier it is to incorporate health and information into every minute of our lives. But the more pervasive the technology, the greater the human desire for meaning and context. The most disruptive force in healthcare right now are the providers equipped to meet that hunger.

Great post! & Dr. Annis, you hit it right on the head. “They want someone to look them directly in the eye, and help them makes sense out of the glut of information they are already exposed to.” (and help them understand what it means to them personally as a patient. This is exactly what the larger healthcare system is NOT prepared to do. The change will come bottom up from patients (and providers) that meet that challenge.

Good article. Although many doctors agree that the doctor-patient communication needs to be fixed. The one commodity that’s precious is TIME – both in terms of availability and the desire to monetize it fully.

So I think the technology and tools have to improve to address through a combination of some automation, making it as easy as facebook and probably through a mechanism by which patients loyalty can be measured so that doctors see the ROI.

Great article. Communication or engagement in healthcare is so important.

Everyone always uses the Dr. Koop quote that pills don’t work in patients that don’t take them. It’s the same with everything else. If patients don’t listen and engage then even the best programs / apps, don’t work.

Too often programs are designed to drive initial engagement or to check the box that they’ve reached out, but most programs don’t sustain engagement.

People need to design programs that evolve with the patient, mix up channels of interaction, and provide value to the patient not to the payer. There’s still a long way to go.